So, in the wake of selling The Barn we suddenly have a good-sized chunk of cash. Good-sized enough so that Steve, our financial-advisor-guy, was positively bouncy when he called us to ask what to do with the money. Since we are, as they say in the money world, risk-averse, with college costs swarming up to meet us at any moment, and more college costs when the first round stops, we're not talking investing in gold mines or oil wells. So Steve goes through his ideas, which mostly sound fine and secure and reasonably liquid...until he sounds us out about buying stock in Philip Morris. Do we have any objections?
And I found that I did. It was pointed out to me that in buying stock we would not be giving money to Philip Morris, just buying paper from someone else and, of course, taking whatever dividends Philip Morris was paying.
There's the rub: I don't want their money. This may be, in part, because my mother smoked Pall Malls until four months before she died (and only stopped because she was too weak to walk down the hall and away from her oxygen tank in order to smoke). Or because Big Tobacco is still marketing to children, and to people in other countries, opening new markets as the markets in this country contract. Maybe it's because my father read the Surgeon General's report on tobacco in 1963 and quit smoking, and it's forty years later and they're still peddling the same drugs. I just don't want their money.
I know, I know. This is a problem that only comfortably-off people have. I think both the Spouse and Steve thought I was being a little finicky, but oh, well. If I'm going to try to live a reasonably careful life, maybe this is where I start.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}